… Bush continues to bungle what should have been Item One in any real war on terrorism: finding and killing Osama bin Laden, and getting rid of the Taliban. Both are thriving in Pakistan while we are off frying bigger fish such as tax cuts for the wealthy.

Instead, we’re off weakening our own country by continuing to refuse to do basic, real war-on-terror stuff, such as insuring that freight entering our country is actually inspected. (And, of course, the “it costs too much” defense is ridiculous, since a number of advanced and economically successful ports abroad, such as Hong Kong, in fact do have effective, 100 percent inspection programs: “This low-cost system of inspection is being carried out with no adverse impact on the marine terminals operations and without any U.S. government funding. It could be put in place globally at a cost of $1.5 billion or roughly $10 per container.”)

And, since the apparent goal of the Bush Administration is to weaken our country as much as possible, the proactive steps that the Bush Administration has taken, such as spying on U.S. citizens with no warrant and alienating all our allies, are both ineffective at detecting terrorist plots and corrosive of the strong, liberty-based, individual-protecting model that made our country great.

(For the record, I don’t pretend to know exactly why Bush has made it his goal to weaken and tear down our country; I suspect that with respect to the president personally, it has to do with revenge against the Big Daddy father who so clearly holds him in contempt to this day. But this doesn’t explain his legions of eager enablers, both in his administration, in congress, and in the media. Some crazy self-destructive biological urge like lemmings’ mythical rush to the sea? I don’t know. But it really doesn’t matter why Bush is weakening the country in every way he can. The only important thing is to identify that it is happening, and that the process cannot be reversed until Bush is either hobbled or leaves office. More BA posts on Bush as the “Weakener-in-Chief” here.)

Only then can a real, non-scared shitless, world community-based struggle against the forces that created the murderers of 9/11 begin.